One of the things that fascinates me is the discovery of historical details and connections that add layers of meaning to our understanding, and to the stories we tell about the past.

Recently, I learned of the threads that connect Audrey Hepburn and Anne Frank. The girls were born within one month of each other in 1929, Anne in Germany and Audrey in Belgium. Audrey lived with her English-Austrian father in England for several years, but by the time the war broke out, both girls had moved to the Netherlands, where they ended up living just miles apart.

​After Nazi Germany invaded Holland in the spring of 1940, Jewish Anne Frank would become known to the world for the diary she wrote while hiding for her life. She would die in a Nazi death camp.

Audrey Hepburn's parents supported Adolf Hitler, her father an agent for the Nazi regime, her mother an admirer of the Fuhrer.

But Audrey joined the resistance and suffered near starvation under German occupation resulting in her often-admired slender figure, famous in the movies Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany's.

At the end of World War II and the Netherlands' Hunger Winter, Audrey, aged sixteen, stood five foot six, but weighed only 88-pounds.

She was one of the first to read Anne Frank's diary, but asked to play in a movie based on Diary of a Young Girl, Audrey declined the role, saying it was too painful.

Her son Luca Dotti told People Magazine his mother knew passages of Anne Frank's diary by heart. “My mother never accepted the simple fact that she got luckier than Anne. She possibly hated herself for that twist of fate.”

Audrey Hepburn's British-Austrian father and Dutch Baroness mother both held fascist sympathies in the 1930s. Ella van Heemstra had a private meeting with Adolf Hitler, where, to the Baroness's bliss, the Nazi leader kissed her hand.

Audrey Hepburn and her mother Ella Van Heemstra

Audrey's father left the family before the war,and apparently in 1942, her mother had a change of heart about Hitler after the Nazis executed her sister's husband.

Otto van Limburg Stirum was arrested in retaliation for sabotage by the resistance movement. He and four others were driven to a forest, made to dig their own graves and then shot.

Before that, the realities of the war had come gradually to Audrey.

“The first few months we didn’t know quite what had happened … I just went to school,” Hepburn said. “In the schools, the children learned their lessons in arithmetic with problems like this: ‘If 1,000 English bombers attack Berlin and 900 are shot down, how many will return to England?’"

Audrey had started to learn ballet as a young girl in England, and as conditions became strained and dangerous, she turned back to dance to relieve the pressure of Nazi rule.

"When I would go to the station, there were cattle cars packed with Jewish families, with old people and children,” Hepburn once said. “We did not yet know that they were traveling to their deaths. People said they were going to the ‘countryside.’ It was very difficult to understand, for I was a child. All the nightmares of my life are mixed in with those images.”

A quiet, withdrawn child, Audey bloomed on the stage and soon began to perform at illegal events in hidden venues with the windows blacked out. These by-invitation-only zwarte avonden, black evenings, raised money for the Dutch Resistance.

“Guards were posted outside to let us know when Germans approached,” Hepburn would later say. “The best audiences I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performance.”

​Audrey Hepburn Aides Nazi Resistance

Audrey also helped deliver tiny-sized copies of a resistance newspaper, Oranjekrant. “I stuffed them in my woolen socks in my wooden shoes, got on my bike and delivered them.” As a teenager, she avoided the suspicions of police and was also able to carry messages and food to Allied pilots shot down over the Netherlands in 1944.

Though Audrey's mother had been known as a lipstick Nazi for being friendly with German soldiers early in the war, she sheltered an English pilot in their home. Luca Dotti wrote that it was a thrilling experience for Audrey. "It was risky, he was a stranger in uniform, a savior, and therefore a knight and hero. [But] if you were caught hiding an enemy, the whole family would be taken away.”

Dutch people in the countryside felt the deprivations of war acutely in the winter of 1944-45, later known as Hongerwinter, Hunger Winter. Families went without heat and electricity and food grew scarce. Audrey sometimes didn't eat for as long as three days, and sometimes subsisted on bread made from brown beans and potatoes.

Children at soup kitchen during the Hunger Winter of Nazi Occupation in Holland.

According to Hepburn's son, “Twenty two thousand people died from hunger in Holland during the final months of World War II, my mother escaping death by a hairbreadth.”

Audrey's town was finally liberated by Allied troops in spring 1945.

​Throughout her life, Audrey Hepburn spoke very little about the war years, some say out of fear that her parents' Nazi sympathies might harm her acting career.

A good number of books have told the story of Audrey Hepburn's movie star career, jet-setting life and generosity as an ambassador for UNICEF. But a new biography out this month focuses specifically on her life during World War II.

I wrote about new evidence concerning the arrest of Anne Frank's family here...

Standing Up Against Hate debuts today! It's the story of how black women in the U.S. Army changed the course of WWII. It's an honor and a privilege to tell the stories of these courageous women. Here's a sample of feedback I've gotten on the book.★Starred Review, School Library Connection:"A nonfiction writer for youth audiences, Farrell settles in to explain with depth and precision the fight black women faced both in and out of the military as World War II surged. Focused specifically on black women in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), the book profiles several key figures, including Major Charity Adams who commanded the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion.

"In addition to the deft writing, images are presented every few pages that reveal a score of brave women who persevered despite suffering discrimination. The women had to proclaim their equality in the face of segregation in the mess hall and in dispatching the unit overseas.

"The text also details how some servicewomen were jailed for disobeying orders or even beaten by civilians while wearing their uniforms. Organized chronologically, the text is accessible for middle school and high school historians who are intrigued by institutional racism or women in the military for research. It profiles milestones in the 6888th’s preparation and deployment, providing a well-researched understanding of the time period for black women in the military.

"The book is a gem that profiles an underrepresented narrative in American history."​Available at the links below or your favorite bookstore.

She grew up working in the tobacco fields of Wake County, North Carolina. Her parents had a large family, ten children, because sharecropping required many hands and all-consuming labor.

How did Clara Leach make the leap from the Jim Crow south to Brigadier General in the U.S. Army?

She wrote the story of her life after retirement to set the record straight. "I was increasingly encountering people who assumed that I was successful because I was born with a “silver spoon” in my mouth or I just “got lucky.”

At age five Clara cooked and tended younger siblings in a house with no electricity or running water, while her parents and older siblings grew and harvested tobacco for a white landowner.

Soon Clara graduated to field work. That included planting, hoeing, pulling weeds, walking the rows "topping" off the buds to stimulate growth, and picking worms off the leaves and squishing them.

​"Growing tobacco...is a very difficult crop...labor intensive," Clara says. "So my father and mother had ten children, and we were all employed full time on that farm in tobacco."

Photo: The daughter of an African American sharecropper at work in a tobacco field in Wake County, North Carolina. Credit: Dorothea Lange, July 1939.

First ingredient in the elixir for success:Learn to work hard.

Clara's parents believed in education as well as hard work. And though she missed a lot of school due to farm work, Clara skipped two grades and graduated at sixteen, salutatorian of her class.

The painful experience of prejudice at her segregated school in Wake County launched the attitude that would carry Clara from the soil of North Carolina to the halls of the Pentagon.

Segregated School, Illinois, 1937.

"Many members of the African-American community considered dark skin ugly. Unattractive. Undesirable. That message came across loud and clear in terms of which students were favored by teachers, and by other students," Clara says. "When I raised my hand, the teacher would never call on me."

"Instead, a kid with straight hair and fair skin always got picked. Some of them were really smart, but so was I. It was all part of a warped value system that some black people still embrace today-the closer you are to being white, the better off and more beautiful you are."

Clara's mother told her beauty was skin deep and that what others thought of her didn't matter. "It's what you think of yourself that matters," she said. It was a good lesson but it didn't take away the sting of being passed over.

Clara made a decision. ​

Elixir for success:Education

"I spent a lot of time getting even smarter, because I knew knowledge could never be snatched from me, regardless of whether I was high yellow or black as midnight," says Clara. Those early snubs and slights I experienced due to skin color further motivated me to excel. They lit a fire under me that drove me to succeed not just at academics, but at whatever endeavor I tackled."

She went college at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to study nursing. There Clara took part in the the famous Greensboro sit-ins at the Woolworth's lunch counter.

She told an interviewer for the Women Veterans Historical Project about her experience with non-violent protest. "When people push you, spit on you, curse you and do those kinds of things, it’s very difficult not to raise your hand. But in reality, when you think about it, it’s quite a powerful thing to be able to sit and do nothing while people do that."

Students protesting segregation at the lunch counter of the Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina. Photo: Library of Congress

To fund her last two years of college, Clara signed up for the Army Student Nurse Program scholarship. After graduation in 1961. she entered the U.S. Army Nurse Corps as a 2nd Lieutenant.

​Her values of hard work and a positive attitude continued to serve her well as she met obstacles as a woman and a black in the army.

"Obstacles are not really there to stop one’s progress. They are really opportunities for us to decide how we will overcome them to reach our goals. If we keep the goal in mind, then we can decide if we will go over, under, around or through the obstacle to accomplish it."

Essential:Attitude

​In 1965, Clara became a medical-surgical nursing instructor at Fort Sam Houston where she became the first woman in the army to earn the Expert Field Medical Badge. She continued to rise in the ranks and continue her education, the first nurse corps officer to graduate from the Army War College and the first woman to earn a Master’s Degree in military arts and sciences from the Army’s Command and General Staff College.

Assigned to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Clara trained a generation of nurses and then became the first African American to serve as vice president and chief of the department of nursing at the hospital. In 1987 she was promoted to Brigadier General and named Chief of the Army Nurse Corps and Chief of Army medical personnel.

The list of Clara Leach Adams-Enders' accomplishments in the army is long and impressive, including formal distinctions like the Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster and informal such as recruiting minority student nurses at Walter Reed.

She led the Army Nurse Corps through two major combat operations, Just Cause and Desert Shield/Storm. Clara is also known for her remarkable warmth and humility.

With hard work, education and the right attitude, Clara Leach Adams-Ender made the journey from sharecropper's daughter to the highest ranks of the U.S. Army. Her success also stands on the shoulders of those who trod this path before her. Thousands of African American women overcame obstacles to serve with distinction in the U.S. Army during WWII. Read their story in Standing Up Against Hate: How Black Women in the Army Helped Change the Course of WWII.

Fannie Sellins went hungry and cold and she went to jail. She challenged powerful men and mighty corporations with nothing but her voice, and her ability to bring people together and inspire hope.

When gunmen threatened to kill her, she stood on the picket line strong as steel. For her principles, Fannie died with a bullet to the back.
This astounding story has gone untold for generations. Enter now to win a free copy of ​Fannie Never Flinched: One Woman's Courage in the Struggle for American Labor Union Rights.

It brings me to tears every time I hear it. I am not kidding! Listen below. Utah Phillips called Anne, "The best labor singer in North America."

The Grand Prize includes the book, the CD, and then there's more!

If you're the grand prize winner, I'll visit your union meeting, book group, library, or classroom via Skype. I'll talk about my ten year research and obsession with Fannie Sellins, how I kept faith in my vision and how FANNIE NEVER FLINCHED came to be the beautiful book that it is! Or, you pick a topic and we'll visit via Skype at a mutually agreeable time.

​Enter as many times as you want and tell your friends! All prize drawing will occur on or before April 1, 2017.

Two Women Revolutionized Science and Changed the World. Irene Curie--not Marie Curie, the Nobel-Prize-winning scientist you've heard about, but her teenage daughter. The story takes one twist after another, and here to tell it is Winifred Conklin author of the new book Radioactive!

Seventeen-year-old Irene Curie volunteered to serve in World War I as an x-ray technician. She used portable x-rays to help surgeons identify shrapnel and perform operations near the battlefield.

​Below Irene Curie on a mobile x-ray unit in 1916.

Her mother had developed the military x-ray program. Marie wanted to win her mother’s respect, and, frankly, she wanted to spend some time with her mom. This combination of brilliant scientist and vulnerable teen made her an irresistible subject to me.

Lise Meitner in the laboratory (1913).

The Germans were using x-ray technology, too. Lise Meitner, an Austrian who had been working in Berlin when the war began, performed the same work as Irene. She was an x-ray technician on the German side of WWI.

Both Curie and Meitner would prove to be among the most accomplished female scientists of the 20th century. These women were among a handful of physicists worldwide who were working on better understanding atomic structure.

Curie had been born into the “First Family of Science” (both of her parents had won Nobel Prizes), But Meitner had been turned away from higher education programs because she was a woman.

She finally had a chance to study physics at the University of Vienna in 1901, but she repeatedly came up against obstacles.

She was not paid in the early years of her research program, and she had to set up her own laboratory in the basement of the science building because she was not allowed to work in the main lab with the men.

The chief scientist claimed he was afraid her hair would catch fire, even though she wore her hair in a tight bun and the men in the lab almost universally wore elaborate facial hair.

During their careers, both Irene and Lise made important discoveries in the understanding of physics. Curie and her husband, Frederic Joliot, discovered artificial radiation. They won a Nobel Prize in 1934 for their work.

Lise had to flee Nazi Germany in 1938, leaving her laboratory and research behind. She continued to consult with her former lab partner, Otto Hahn, and she made the breakthrough in understanding of nuclear fission.

Ultimately, Hahn took credit for her discovery and claimed the Nobel Prize for the work they did together. Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in West Germany in 1962.

Bombing of Nagasaki, Japan

The women had seen such horrors on the battlefields during World War I that they had become pacifists; both were horrified that the work they did in the name of science had been used for the creation of the most destructive weapon in the history.

“It is an unfortunate accident that this discovery (of fission) came about in a time of war,” Meitner said.

I find these women inspiring not only because of their accomplishments, but also because of their humanity.

They were undeniably gifted scientists, but they also held fast to their love of peace. Curie dedicated her later years to working for nuclear disarmament; Meitner worked on the development of nuclear energy.

Throughout their lives, they both envisioned a world where scientists could master the art of using the power of the atom not for a weapon but for the benefit of humankind.

Winifred, thrilled to have you on the blog today, and to highlight your wonderful book. Thank you!

Winifred Conkling is an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction for young readers whose works include Passenger on the Pearl: The True Story of Emily Edmonson’s Flight from Slavery (Algonquin, 2015) and the middle-grade novel Sylvia and Aki, winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Literature Award and the Tomás Rivera Award. See more about Winifred's books here.

Pamela D. Toler,author of a new book about the agreed to talk to me about the book, and right off, I told her I tend to be queasy.

She assured me the book touches lightly on the blood and gore of battle wounds, and focuses on the doggedness of the women nurses.

Doggedness they sorely needed because the doctors didn't want their help.

Pamela says ""Just getting to the hospital or battlefield required these women to push against societies assumptions about what ladies should and should not do.

Georgeanna Woolsey was a New York socialite who took all the trimming off one of her dresses and a bonnet, dressed her hair as plainly as possible and, to the amazement of her family, bluffed her way into a slot in the nurses training program."

Civil War Nurses, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Library of Congress

Georgeanna Woolsey wrote, "No one knows who did not watch the thing from the beginning, how much opposition, how much ill-will, how much unfeeling want of thought, these women nurses endured. Hardly a surgeon whom I can think of received or treated them with even common courtesy. Government had decided that women should be employed, and the Army surgeons - unable therefore to close the hospitals against them - determined to make their lives so unbearable that they should be forced in self-defense to leave."

Savage Station, Virginia. Union field hospital after the battle of June 27 Includes the straw-hatted Sixteenth New York Infantry who fought at Gaines' Mill on June 27. Most were captured when Confederates overtook the area during the battle of Savage's Station on June 29 during the Peninsular Campaign. Library of Congress

Pamela says the nurses"learned to cope with the sights and smells of a military hospital—dysentery and amputations were both ugly things. Some women didn't last. And I can't blame them.

Author Pamela D. Toler

Even filtered through nineteenth century gentility, the first hand accounts of Civil War hospitals are pretty grim. But many women gathered up their courage and learned not only to bandage wounds but to elbow their way through a hostile bureaucracy. They came out of the war with new skills and new confidence.

​And after the war many of them used their new skills at organizing and working within male-dominated bureaucracies to make the world around them a better place.

Woman seated in doorway is volunteer nurse Abby Gibbons of New York City (Source: descendant Angela Schear, Oct. 2013. Library of Congress)

​"Many people, including me," says Pamela, "are intrigued by the stories of the women who disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. They were colorful and heroic, but their choices didn't change anything.

​"I would argue that the women who served as nurses and their counterparts who ran the soldiers' aid societies that provided soldiers with basic necessities throughout the war had a profound impact on the status of women after the war. If you look at an American reform movement after 1865, the odds are you'll find a former Civil War nurse in the middle of things."

Pamela says the message she has taken from these Civil War nurses is that the first step to changing the world is challenging yourself.

Sometimes I think I get enough challenge just waking up in the morning, but these women went out and grabbed trouble by the horns and hung on. For women of their time, they were downright amazing!

When tragedy or loss shatters our heart, we have moments when it's difficult, even impossible, to imagine putting all the pieces back together. They don't teach that in school.

So when I meet someone who's done it, someone who has made their way through sorrow and pain to find joy and fullness of life, I want to know how they did it.

Amber J. Keyser’s debut novel THE WAY BACK FROM BROKEN tells the story of a fifteen-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl thrown together by tragedy who find hope and healing in the Canadian wilderness.​

There is an intensely personal story behind this book, and I'm honored and grateful the author has agreed to post today and share her story. Amber... ​I have always used writing to sort through my experiences, my deepest thoughts, and my hidden fears. There is a box of journals in my attic begun in high school and continued sporadically for all these years into which I penciled my troubles and my victories. For me, words were a way to both exorcise the demons that haunted me and to make sense of my life and relationships.

When I was expecting my first child, a little girl named Esther Rose, my journal entries turned into letters. I chronicled her first movements, my dreams of her, and my hopes for our life together. I wrote to a person that I knew more intimately than anyone else in the world. I wrote from a deep sense that she was the child I had been waiting for my whole life. Together we were forging a new future.

Author Amber J. Keyser

And then she died, this baby girl of mine. This heart of my heart. A cord accident during labor ended her life before it even had a chance to begin. For a long time I thought it had ended mine as well. But I kept writing letters to my daughter. I poured my grief onto the page.

This was fifteen years ago, and the words I wrote were nowhere close to a novel. It took ten years walking the paths of grief, and the safe births of two more children, before I felt ready to write about my loss for others to read.

When I began, one of the women in my critique group asked me if I was ready, really ready, to go back into the shadows. She reminded me of how long it would take, how many times I would have to revise, and how it might feel to receive feedback on such personal material. And yet I forged ahead, crafting characters, who were partly me but also not me, to carry a story that was partly mine but also not mine. ​

​"I had to returnto very painful places"

​Later on, when I was bringing pages to our group, another member had to gently, so gently, remind me not to let the mother take over the story. This was indeed the challenge of writing THE WAY BACK FROM BROKEN. A challenge I faced again and again and again.

To write a novel that would be both honest and true, I had to return to very painful places, but I also had to find a way to peel the emotional truth from my experience and transfer it into the story. It is hard to describe how this worked, harder still to explain how it felt.

The words that capture it best are from THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER by CS Lewis. When Eustace describes how Aslan changed him from a dragon back into a boy, he says:

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know—if you’ve ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.~C.S. Lewis

"eviscerating and freeing​ at the same time."

It was like that for me—eviscerating and freeing at the same time. There were many times that I wept, and afterwards I would experience a strange lightness as if transferring suffering to the page had unburdened me. To my surprise, this sensation of having released my pain has continued.

Over time, my letter writing to my baby has diminished until for the past ten years or so I have only written her letters on her birthday. This year was the first one in which I didn’t even do that. I didn’t forget. I just didn’t need to. THE WAY BACK FROM BROKEN is my love song to the daughter I didn’t get to raise, and it says exactly what I needed it to say.

And here's what Booklist is saying in its starred review, “Keyser’s debut novel is an exquisite and enthralling exploration of loss, love, and healing.”

Thanks so much for sharing, Amber.

For more about Amber J. Keyser, her books and her upcoming appearances check out her website here: www.amberjkeyser.com.

More about THE WAY BACK FROM BROKEN:

Rakmen Cannon’s life is turning out to be one sucker punch after another. His baby sister died in his arms, his parents are on the verge of divorce, and he’s flunking out of high school. The only place he fits in is with the other art therapy kids stuck in the basement of Promise House, otherwise known as support group central. Not that he wants to be there. Talking doesn’t bring back the dead.

When he’s shipped off to the Canadian wilderness with ten-year-old Jacey, another member of the support group, and her mom, his summer goes from bad to worse. He can’t imagine how eight weeks of canoeing and camping could be anything but awful.

Yet despite his expectations, the vast and unforgiving backcountry just might give Rakmen a chance to find the way back from broken . . . if he’s brave enough to grab it.

Author

I'm an award-winning author of Children's/YA books and former journalist with a passion for stories about people facing adversity with courage. My books have been named Notable Social Studies Book for Young People, SPUR Award for Best Juvenile Fiction about the American West, Bank Street College List of Best Children's Books, and NY Public Library Best Books for Teens. My journalistic work has received numerous awards for excellence from the Society of Professional Journalists and two Emmy nominations.